Columbia University Libraries (CUL) acknowledges that its collections practices bear the legacy of colonialism, slavery, and marginalization. We further acknowledge the often-contested history of collecting by universities in the United States and the difficulties that the inherited legacy of these collections can pose, particularly when collections were created or acquired as part of extractive knowledge practices, without the informed consent of those communities to which they pertained, and in ways that are no longer viewed as appropriate or ethical. 

We also acknowledge that Columbia’s fraught history of community relations, nationally and internationally, has contributed to a lack of trust in the institution, its motivations, and its sincerity in responding to community expectations concerning culturally sensitive materials housed at Columbia. CUL values collecting inclusively and across the breadth of human experience and knowledge, especially in relation to material connected to historically marginalized groups, and we recognize that the responsibility to demonstrate commitment to building that trust is entirely ours. 

To reconcile this legacy with contemporary ethical concerns and current best practices across the library profession, CUL is committed to transparency about the collections it stewards, to responsible care for materials, and to shared authority and decision-making with the communities whose cultural heritage is represented in the collections.¹

Included in this is the acknowledgment that processes for inventorying and describing collections are ongoing, informed by evolving standards and ethical considerations, and that CUL will continually aim to address the impact of its historical collecting and stewardship practices. 

To these ends, CUL applies the following values in implementing policies and procedures for collections acquisition and stewardship:

• Commitment to transparency and access, including:

  • Providing publicly available inventories and information on the provenance of materials in the collection.

  • Providing clear points of access, contact, and process for inquiries.

• Commitment to responsible care and stewardship for library materials, including:

  • Collecting inclusively across the human experience.

  • Performing due diligence when assessing the material’s history and provenance, both at the point of considering new acquisitions and when performing collections management on materials in legacy collections whose provenance is not adequately documented.

  • Following ethical and evolving best practices for conservation and storage, digitization, display, exhibition, description, and community engagement.

  • Responding promptly and responsibly to requests for consultation, restitution, transfer, and/or repatriation.

• Commitment to community engagement and consultation, including:

  • Communicating respectfully with individuals and community members who have an interest in library collections, collecting practices, and stewardship practices, recognizing that communities are heterogeneous and may encompass stakeholders with different perspectives. 

  • Respecting the wishes of communities whose objects we steward, including any restrictions on use (e.g., access; handling practices; digitization; display; exhibition; research), and in selecting the appropriate language(s) used in descriptive practices.

  • Recognizing the value of the time and expertise offered by community members to the libraries in determining best practices and offering compensation toward this work.

  • Recognizing the humanity and dignity of those individuals whose remains we may steward, including the possibility that legacy collections may contain remains not identified in existing descriptions or inventories and will require immediate attention and disclosure once discovered. 

Policies will be reviewed annually by the Associate University Librarian for Collections and the Libraries’ Directors overseeing distinctive collections. Additional review will be conducted when best practices or legislation change, and by consulting with the Columbia University Office of General Counsel when needed. Professional standards informing CUL’s work include the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (PNAAM), the Society of American Archivists Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics (SAA), the International Council of Archives Code of Ethics (ICA), as well as all applicable legal statutes.

1. New Acquisitions. CUL will:

   1. Consider whether CUL is an appropriate home for the material, including whether we have the capacity to steward it properly.

   2. Engage in shared authority² through community consultation, including in the determination of what to collect and how to physically care for and make accessible acquired materials. 

   3. Require collection sources to provide copies of any initial research contracts, agreements, comparable documents, or narrative histories between themselves and the communities that pertain to the collection (see also Provenance section below).

   4. Require that auction houses and other sources certify that materials were acquired ethically and that the possessor obtained the legal rights of disposition. This can include deposit, purchase, gift, or non-custodial arrangements.³

   5. Integrate these policies into the acquisition procedures of each collecting repository, supported with regular staff training.

2. Provenance. The following policies are applied to all collections, including those acquired long ago. CUL will:

   1. Ensure that each collecting repository is responsible for creating and maintaining the highest possible level of documentation of the context and provenance of every collection it holds, including retention of provenance documentation provided by the collection source at the time of acquisition.

   2. Provide the highest possible level of transparency of provenance information subject to considerations of legal commitments, personal privacy, or university policy.

   3. Conduct provenance research based on compliance, requests, and curatorial priority, in that order. A comprehensive review of holdings is beyond the current capacity of staff.

3. Stewardship. Ethical stewardship is the responsibility of all CUL staff. Stewardship comprises everything that CUL does, including collection development and acquisition, description, preservation, access and use in all its forms (including research, exhibition, teaching, digitization). This policy is designed to emphasize CUL’s ethical and community obligations in its stewardship actions, rather than to rewrite or duplicate existing policy and workflow. CUL will:

   1. Make regulatory compliance the highest priority if CUL identifies either human remains or other objects that may be subject to NAGPRA but not previously identified as such in existing descriptions.

   2. Engage with interested communities in order to share in the stewardship of their materials, i.e. from the point of acquisition or contact around an existing collection, CUL will seek input from and respect the authority of interested communities and engage them in decision-making around the administration of those materials. 

   3. Engage with interested communities to determine meaningful and appropriate methods of access, including but not limited to, restrictions, reformatting, distribution, and display. This may include non-custodial relationships.

   4. Publish and share widely inventories or descriptions where ethically appropriate. There is an ethical duty to contact and communicate with interested communities, and to comply with requested restrictions on display, as above.

   5. Provide transparent pathways to communicate when harmful and/or incorrect language is present in CUL’s current or legacy descriptive practices.

   6. Connect our scholarly community, including students, with the community of creation or origin, for shared decision-making at the point of use. 

   7. Maintain the highest possible level of documentation of the context and provenance of every collection it holds, including ongoing administrative recordkeeping of correspondence, commitments, appraisal, and agreements with communities of creation or origin.

   8. Include in its budgets the financial resources commensurate with its stated values and policies, including staffing, consultation, and training. CUL commits to providing fair and equitable compensation for efforts and knowledge contributed by communities of creation or origin in the stewardship of CUL’s collections.

4. Deaccessioning. CUL will:

   1. Consider the deaccessioning of materials based on: their continued relevance to the mission of Columbia University; if a more ethically or culturally appropriate home is identified; the presence of environmental safety hazards, illegal content, or legally protected personal information.

   2. Apply the shared stewardship principles defined above to deaccessioning.

5. Repatriation. CUL will:

   1. Respond to NAGPRA inquiries and repatriation claims in a respectful and timely manner, in full compliance with the law.

   2. Respond to inquiries and repatriation claims on collections not governed by NAGPRA in accordance with best practices and guided by the values represented in these policies.

 

¹ CUL acknowledges that community can be defined in multiple ways by various constituencies and stakeholders, and no single definition will suffice to fully encompass or adequately represent all characteristics of community over time or place. In the context of this document, community is used in its broadest sense to refer to any group of people, or representative thereof, with geographic, social, societal, cultural, historical, ancestral, or other interest in or claim to objects in the collections and the knowledge contained therein.

² In the context of this document, shared authority refers to efforts that open the historical interpretation of collections to the public, including and especially those from communities of creation or origin. As defined by the Oral History Association, “Shared authority removes the hierarchy commonly practiced within cultural institutions. Moving away from a top-down approach, shared authority is geared toward collaboration that includes dialogue and participatory engagement. The practice of shared authority creates opportunities for oral and written histories contributed by individuals outside the strictly academic community in conjunction with more traditional scholarly essays, text panels or exhibit labels.”

³ In the context of this document, non-custodial arrangements refers to instances where individuals or entities retain ownership, control, and possession over their collections, rather than transferring those to a library (e.g., programs wherein an owner permits access to their collections for the purposes of digitization without transferring ownership or possession, and further permits the library to steward and provide access to those digital surrogates to the broader community it serves).